TIMES BOOK PRIZES 1992 : ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD for First Fiction : On “High Cotton”

Darryl Pinckney has reason to look happy in his dust-jacket photograph. “High Cotton” is a fireworks of joy, humor, kaleidoscopic knowledge and faith; a serio-comic Bildungsroman of nationality, class and religion--as well as race. Darryl Pinckney is black, but that is beside the point. “High Cotton” represents Pinckney’s struggle to master all his dualities--black and American; black and privileged; black and creative; creative and human. In the Chinese circles to the inner city of the self, home--the personal landscape where you are alone with your God--is beyond black and white.

“High Cotton” is religious because it questions the meaning of human suffering, and understands that every aspect of the human condition has value, because the parts create the whole. This discovery of the single human heartbeat, of the self as part and parcel of all humanity, is redemptive--and what growing up is supposed to be all about. It is also the discovery of truth. “What is truth?” Herod asked. You know it when you see it. It is itself--like Anne Frank.

Pinckney’s is an important new literary voice on many levels. His hero-self is every American outsider who ever wore the “adventurer’s cap,” from Huck Finn to Holden Caulfield. And he is every student on the O’Neill-Saroyan street of life, in a bar called the Melody Coast (with habitues like Jeanette, an aging Motown backup singer with attitude).

In terms of the American mainstream, Indiana-raised Pinckney has as much sense of people and place as McCullers or Capote in characters like Aunt Clara, the rich Alabama recluse, and in baroque curlicues of family names like Eustace, Castor and Ulysses. In the landscape of magic realism, his colors may be more Disney than Doctorow, but a Farrakhan meeting, evoking all the outsider’s terror of the mob, recalls Nathanael West. To mark the “outsider” status as literary as well as personal, Djuna Barnes (T. S. Eliot’s “genius with little talent”) makes an appearance in the book.

In the black pantheon, Ralph Ellison is king of magic realism, but Pinckney also leads (with acerbic fatalism) an “invisible” life--in an enclosed Upper West Side New York City air shaft the landlord calls a “studio.” Richard Wright is a laser of sociological truth, but Pinckney sees 1960s black radical politics with the balanced, if ironic, eye of justice. He is less subtle than Toni Morrison, but that may be the gender gap. He has all of Baldwin’s anger, but is less didactic. And Pinckney uniquely combines Langston Hughes’ jazzy elan with the beatific fervor of an 18th-Century black evangelical poet. “High Cotton” is “black” because it is a repository of wonderfully arcane black history, but it is not Afro-centric. The “Old Country” is “Virginia, not Benin.”

But Pinckney is a natural integrationist, in ways that are fraught with folly. Young Darryl drags his family to the Vienna Boys Choir, only to be snubbed backstage by a little Nazi. His consciousness semi-raised by the ‘60s, he passes out Black Power leaflets from a friend’s MG. Soldiering on against the mainstream at Columbia in the 1970s, he earns the enmity of the Black Table in the school cafeteria. At work in publishing in the 1980s (Pinckney comes late to the concept of 9 to 5), he finally seeks out the Black Caucus--headed by a grave, suspicious, ex-basketball player who is given to reading Maimonides and Saint-Simon and nicknamed “St. Maurice” for the black warrior saint. Maurice is assistant managing editor because the publisher, pushed by affirmative action, promoted the only black college graduate he knew. Maurice is a master at beating affirmative action, yuppiedom and upward mobility all at their own games.

“High Cotton” is, in fact, as much about the American Dream as it is about race or religion. Blacks were immigrants too--from the “Old Country” of the South. But privileged Pinckney is third-generation black middle class, growing up in a Midwestern, white, “Ozzie and Harriet” suburb, next to a restricted golf club.

There is little wonder that young Pinckney, in his mind’s eye, sees himself as beyond color. He is certainly beyond the color fixation of large, pale Negro ladies who say, “Why you’re the darkest of the family.” Equally, he longs to escape the “old darky” black-history tales of his grandfather, a Harvard-educated Congregational minister who carried on love/hate relationships with his entire family and drove his dwindling black Southern flock to muffled groans and furtive watch examination with his lucid Cambridge-style homilies. The progression from old age to death of this repository of black history, world erudition and Scripture is the heart of the novel’s humanity.

Coming to terms with mortality at his grandfather’s death, Pinckney understands that he, too, will some day be someone’s “old darky,” with tales to tell. “I may elect myself a witness and undertake to remember when something more important than black, white, and other was lost. Even now I grieve for what has been betrayed. I see the splendor of the mornings and hear how glad the songs were, back in the days when the Supreme Court was my Lourdes, beyond consolation. The spirit didn’t lie down and die, but it’s been here and gone, been here and gone.”

This tone of despair, this weeping for lost humanity, is the book’s only jarring note. But “High Cotton” is a first novel--and despair is the answer of youth. Pinckney should remember St. Maurice.

THE ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD

For First Fiction

HIGH COTTON, By Darryl Pinckney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

FINALISTS

1959, By Thulani Davis (Grove Weidenfeld)

SHE’S COME UNDONE, By Wally Lamb (Pocket Books)

AFTER MOONDOG, By Jane Shapiro (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich)

MARINE LIFE, By Linda Svendsen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)